


Enough

by Astrageneia



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 06:37:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14099448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Astrageneia/pseuds/Astrageneia
Summary: A five-word text changes Steve's life forever.





	Enough

_She's gone. In her sleep._

He had to get out of that room. The stairwell wasn’t exactly secure, but it was close enough. Steve wasn’t certain that he’d breathed since he read those words, and even his body was starting to complain about the lack of oxygen. He needed to breathe. Force some air past the iron vise around his throat. But he couldn’t. He knew that when he did, the grief would come. And then it would be real.

_She's gone. In her sleep._

Nothing about the world had been right since he came out of the ice. It was too loud, too flashy, too fast. For every advancement, there had been so many steps back. Nothing was as it should be, but he had been adapting as best he could. The world didn’t always make sense, but even by today’s standards, surely such momentous, world breaking news shouldn’t be delivered by five words on a glowing screen. 

He should have been there.

It should have been different.

They should have had time.

_She's gone. In her sleep._

Even in her more lucid moments, they never talked about it, the night she had spent standing outside of the Stork Club, hoping against hope that her partner would arrive. Seventy years ago. Their timing had always been terrible, but this felt like one last, cruel joke. It had been enough, almost enough, to sit with her, reveling, basking in the moments when his Peggy was there, whole, hearty, alive. Her eyes as vivacious as they had ever been; tongue, if anything, sharper; heart even bigger for all the years that she had lived.

The years he had missed.

His teammates teased him about being an old man. It didn’t matter to him, most days. The weirdness of his life rolled over him like a wave, and he was no longer fighting it. He’d seen more, in the years that he had lived, but in reality he was much closer in age to Nat than he was to Tony. He wondered, sometimes, if it would have been easier to have lived all those years, to have the deaths of his friends, natural and un, spread out instead of hearing about all of them at once. 

Well. Almost all of them.

His own heart broke every time she slipped away, every time her memories faded. He’d watched her die a hundred times before today. Didn’t make this day any easier. 

_She's gone. In her sleep._

He took a few shallow breaths to calm his burning lungs. Focused on his breathing for a moment to keep holding it all at bay. There were calls to be made. Arrangements. Even with everything that was happening, he still had the Stark Industries resources at his command. He’d never really used them before, always felt uncomfortable with it. But he pressed the contact that Tony had preprogrammed in his phone (and taken great delight in explaining to the “old man” how it worked). An efficient, polite, soothing voice answered, and he heard himself calmly ask for flights, accommodation, transportation. Planning, he could do. Even if the voice seemed far away, as if it didn’t belong to him. It was all set. A car would be waiting for him outside in a few minutes. 

Legs moved. He was walking. A target, a goal, a plan. This, he could do. He nodded politely at people in the corridors. Saw Sam, then Nat, looking for him, avoided them both. Couldn’t say why, exactly. They were his friends, friends who didn’t know, who would be there for him in this moment if he asked them to. But he couldn’t. Neither of them truly had an inkling of who Peggy had been to him. Even Bucky had never quite understood, as Bucky could and did have a new girl on his arm ever since. Post-serum, Steve understood that he could have, too, but he’d only ever truly wanted the one. They’d talked about it, one day, and Peggy had gently but firmly reminded him that she wasn’t the only person in the world, that someday he would find someone new. He understood that, on a logical level, but even the nurse-that-wasn’t had never come close.

How do you mourn an almost? What do you do with the hope of a love that never quite was?

A memory flashed through, her eyes the night they’d sat in the bombed out pub, when for a moment he’s thought that the almost might have become something different. But the moment hadn’t been right, it had been the night he had tried and failed to drink away Bucky’s death. He could no more do that now than he could then. But Bucky was still alive out there, somewhere.

She wasn’t. Never would be again. 

No second chances.

No first ones, for that matter. He’d loved her then. Loved her now. Had accepted the pain of being so close, so very close, to having her back. He had told himself it was enough just to talk with her again, just to spend time. It was enough. And it wasn’t.

It was never enough. Every moment was a beautiful, horrible torment he had chosen for himself. He couldn’t walk away from the pain, as the joy it brought him to have her back in whatever capacity was worth it. So he told himself, anyway. But on the whole, it had been true. He could take the pain of not quite having her.

He wasn’t certain he could take the pain of not having her at all. 

_She's gone. In her sleep._

He ducked into the waiting car, berating himself for turning her death into his own personal pity party. What they could have been aside, he would always have what they had been. She had been his light. The guiding star, picture placed in his compass not just because he looked at it so often, but for the future she had promised. 

The light was gone. He’d have to find his own way, now.


End file.
